Process

Spending increasing numbers of hours on the computer, over many years, one can forget (like the proverbial frog in the hotter-and-hotter water) just how far away from home one actually is. For the first thirty years of my life I made things with my hands. For the next thirty, I've made more and more of those things inside this box, including the work of my profession. Graphic design, when I began, was the province of ink and paper, knives and rulers, glue and wax and ruling pens. Even when my own work was done, there would be more ink-on-paper during the printing process: a process that designers needed to understand from start to finish.

We drove past the printing plant of the Montreal Gazette yesterday, with its oversize photographs of newspaper-carrying readers in the windows, and I asked J. how long he thought newspapers would keep on printing paper editions. Not that much longer, he replied, and I agree with him. We haven't gone to an offset printer for a press check in years. Like so many others, we're living and working more and more inside our computers, which have become laptops, and are shrinking further into palm-sized computers masquerading as phones. We walk around the streets holding this customized, self-contained world in our hands, often oblivious to everything else around us - and why not? Everyone and everything we care about, practically, is right there...

But I've noticed, in my recent forays into drawing and printmaking, how much my hands have missed the feel of real materials and the pleasure of movement that turns raw substances into something different: a dress, a knitted hat, a 2-dimensional depiction of reality. I've missed the smell of printing ink, whether relief ink for a linocut or the characteristic smell of a pressroom and newly-printed press sheets in the back of the car. Sometimes, I think, only cooking remains for a lot of people as a way to experience the transformation of ingredients into something we can use in a different way, and enjoy not only for its aesthetic and sensory qualities but for the fact that we can feel, in our hands and bodies, that we made this thing ourselves, by hand.

There's plenty to do in an art studio, even when the muse hasn't come to work yet. Today I opened up (that took some doing) some cans of old relief ink that I thought might be unusable, cut off the thick skin that had formed at the top, and discovered perfectly good ink hiding underneath, away from the air. I cut some new wax paper "skins" to put over the top of the ink, and cleaned up my tools and my hands, covered with smears of oily black and Venetian red. There's something profoundly satisfying for me about even a simple task like that.

Hands are astounding -- have you ever really thought about them? I think we're meant to use them, to experience the most primitive of creative acts, like thrusting them into a vein of clay or mud in the earth and feeling, beneath our fingers, the lump of earth we pull out slowly form into a shape. My mother and I used to dig our own clay from a streambed, and then clear it of pebbles before making it into a figure, or a pot. How many people today have done something like that? This seems, to me, like a much greater change and loss than the printed book or newspaper, and I hardly know where to begin in writing about it, or what it must be doing to our brains and to us as a species. Can we appreciate creation if we don't know what it is to be a creator?

It's not that the computer isn't often a better way - in design, for instance, I'd never argue that digital page payout and typesetting aren't more accurate, easier, faster, leaving more time for creativity and imagination. The results are better, cheaper, more flexible in a lot of ways. I'd go nuts if I had to write this blog post wthout the benefit of a digital text editor! It just strikes me that we aren't using our hands and the brain-hand connection (that seems so intrinsic to the design of the human body) in the same ways anymore, and that this change has taken place, in an evolutionary timescale, overnight. 

In the deepest sense, I wouldn't know who I am - I would be an entirely different person - if I had never made things from scratch, using my hands; it is so fundamental to me. I'm not mourning, I'm just rather astonished. And I wonder if the pendulum will swing back again, with young people looking for crafts and artistic pursuits -- as in the revivial of urban knitting -- that show them something different about what it is to be human.

Comments

[Rachel Barenblat]

In a few weeks our Hebrew school year will begin and I find that I am ridiculously excited about teaching the kids a unit on how Torah scrolls are made: written by hand, using quill and ink, on parchment. We're going to attempt to write our own Hebrew letters using turkey quills on parchment-style paper; I expect the results will be as imperfect as one might imagine, but I'm hoping the embodied experience of trying to shape the letters using a feather and a bottle of ink will give the kids appreciation for the scroll from which they will eventually learn to read.

I'm glad to have the digital world, with all of its blessings, but I would hate to lose connection with the tangible altogether.

[Pica]

Beth, I can smell that ink and hear the shloop of the roller on ink.... love that sound. Thanks for this.

[Marja-Leena]

Ah, Beth! It's as if you were speaking for me, word for word! I have these thoughts so often even as more and more of my printmaking work has become digital, even photographs. I too miss the hands on printing, which is why I often do still print traditionally on top of digital, and hopefully will be doing again this fall as I've just signed myself up into the print studio again.

You speak of the younger generation - yes, one of our daughters is very much into reviving the older arts and crafts, from knitting, spinning, sewing, refinishing antiques, learning blacksmithing and metalwork, and the kitchen arts of food foraging, preserving.... I'm quite amazed and pleased to see this.

I'm looking forward to seeing what you might make with those inks - I can just smell them - and it's made me excited and looking forward to September!

[Natalie]

Yep, me too, all of that.

Ah, those old cans of printing inks! I've thrown out so many when the inks had turned to hard, gritty, unsalvageable stuff because I'd forgotten to put a layer of copperplate oil over the waxpaper skin to stop the inks drying up.

[Mary]

The experience you describe with your mother--digging the clay out of the streambed and clearing the pebbles--what a wonderful memory.

[Kat]

Food is definitely the place where this remains alive for me. I was thinking yesterday that my daughter will learn to take a chicken from hatchling to butchering to stock on the stove. She doesn't ever have to do any of it in her own adult life, but she will know how!

[zuleme]

I've always been a thingmaker, I make jewelry and so does my mother. My sister is an artist, painter and silk screener. The three of us are all fascinated by process and techniques. My mother also sews beautifully and made us costumes and doll clothes. When we were small she and my grandmother made our clothes, beautiful smocked dresses, suits and poodle skirts.
When I would do a crafts fair it surprised me how, if I was doing anything, just hammering on a piece of metal, people would flock to see it. Took me a while to understand how they just didn't know how things were made.
I've always found hands amazing.

[Kristin Berkey-Abbott]

This sentence of yours inspired a whole blog post of mine: "Can we appreciate creation if we don't know what it is to be a creator?"

My post is here: http://liberationtheologylutheran.blogspot.com/2011/08/god-of-rough-drafts.html

Thanks for the inspiration!

[Lorianne]

I think everything you say about tactility applies not just to creative acts but also to the process of cleaning things up. After a long stint of checking discussion forums for my online classes, for instance, it always feels like a relief to do the dishes, take out the trash, or even clean up the inevitable "messes" that living with a houseful of animals entails.

There's a simple immediacy in clean-up chores--something dirty is now clean--even though you know you'll have to do it all again soon enough. For a moment, right now, you SEE the work of your hands.

Maybe in another lifetime, I was a contented farmer, or zookeeper, or milkmaid.

[Mouse]

yes! this is why I spend so much time in the kitchen, although I also did that in France when I wasn't wired at work all day. But it is so therapeutic to bake cakes and bread, back to baking basics and all the better for it!